Representation and distribution of real time traffic information may be data intensive. Mobile navigation devices (e.g., car or personal navigation devices) may not be connected to or in communication with a high speed network for real time traffic updates. In certain cases, the mobile navigation device may be bandwidth constrained. For example, the mobile navigation device may only be able to receive and/or transmit up to a few kilobytes per second.
Current techniques designed to transmit traffic information to a mobile navigation device having bandwidth constraints include radio data system-traffic message channel (RDS-TMC) based location referencing, Agora-C map based location referencing, or transport protocol experts group (TPEG) methods. For example, a RDS-TMC system may use an AM or FM radio signal to send highly compressed bit streams of traffic data to a car or personal navigation system. Unfortunately, these current standards and techniques involve “coding up” as many of the road segments as possible in terms of pre-defined identifications or using latitude/longitude based representations. Therefore, there is a continuing effort to provide improved systems and methods for providing traffic data for a navigation system in a limited bandwidth environment.